Grand Canyon

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This morning we woke up to a free all you can eat breakfast and booked ourselves onto a helicopter ride over the canyon ($185US worth). By this stage we still had not seen the canyon at all.

After a brief safety video and a weigh in we were boarding a small helicopter. I ended up facing backwards and we put our headphones on.

I think there was a trainee girl pilot flying but I had faith. I tried to forget the fact that a helicopter has nothing to glide on if the engine stops, and falling into the canyon probably wouldn’t be much fun.

Being the first time on a helicopter I was impressed at the ease that the helicopter seemed to just float effortlessly off the ground. We jetted over flat dry scrub scattered desert for about 10 minutes. Facing backwards and flying low over such terrain I felt as though I was being air lifted to Vietnam and felt like I should have been putting black face paint on and straddling a gun on my leg.

Eventually some dramatic music came onto the headphones (I think it was Space Oddesy 2001) and what was ground maybe 400 feet below the helicopter dropped straight down into a canyon a mile deep.

The shear awe at the size of the canyon is quite overwhelming and something that could never be caught properly on camera. It is simply huge and a true sense of how big it is can only be felt when immersed in it.

After the helicopter ride we drove into the park and drove to the east rim. At the east rim there was a lookout tower we climbed which had a fantastic view down the middle of the canyon as opposed to just across it. The Colorado River could easily be seen, normally hidden deep down in behind rock strata.

There is a lot of history in the canyon, people have been living in it since 50AD or something (can’t quite remember), and some Indian tribes still live in it to this day. We visited a museum that had artefacts from various ancient people that had lived there, and visited some ruins of a community that lived there 600 years ago.

Apparently they would need to grow enough food to store from the summer for a chance of survival over winter in this cold barren landscape. Don’t ask me how they grew anything at all considering there is nothing but rock and the odd shrub. Some tribes would live in caves dug into the side of the canyon.

Fantastic - we said goodbye to the canyon with a great sunset.

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